Technology & Learning November 2007 - (Page 17) OPEN VS. CLOSED Find open source alternatives to your favorite commercial products. Browse through software categories and compare pros and cons of both commercial products as well as open source software. Information courtesy of osalt.com. n 2001, Indiana officials at the Department of Education were taking stock. The schools had an excellent network infrastructure and had installed significant numbers of computers for 1 million public school enrollees. Yet students were spending less than an hour a week on the computer. Why? Shuttling students to and from computer labs and managing their time there restricted computer use so much that, analysis showed, I certain students had access cut to less than 35 minutes a week. It was then that state officials knew each student needed a computer, and Indiana’s one-to-one initiative was launched. But how were they to pay for such a huge project that would have cost $100 million a year in software licensing alone? Open source. The often-misunderstood technology (thought of as “just free Web 2.0 stuff” by the uniformed) has been the answer in Indiana—and a growing number of school systems across the country—to shrinking school technology budgets and soaring software costs. Today, more than 100,000 Indiana school kids (in all, 300,000 high schoolers are slated to receive one) have their own $298 computer and monitor with numerous free software applications, and, in turn, Continued on page 18 BUSINESS Commercial Visio Project Quicken Money Open Source Kivio OpenProj GnuCash Grisbi PHOTO: PATRICK MCFEELEY/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/GETTY IMAGES most remarkable in that it’s not controlled by one company alone, and free distribution of code is encouraged. In fact, only 2 percent of Torvalds’s original programming remains intact. How Linux Works What Torvalds originally wrote was a kernel, or the precise language within an operating system that controls the computer and tells it what programming to run. From this kernel, entire computer platforms (file and print systems, back-up, application servers, security, databases, etc.) have been written and are constantly being updated. New code (called “patches”) is issued every day by hundreds, if not thousands, of programmers through online Linux communities, making Linux extremely reliable and far less vulnerable to hackers. Distribution Before the commercial distribution of Linux you’d have to be something of a UNIX whiz to set up an operating system. Nowadays, access and distribution is made easy through products from more than 300 “distro” companies, such as Red Hat’s Fedora, Novell’s SUSE, and Ubuntu, which offer free (unsupported) and for-a-subscription-fee (supported) services, managing all updates to your local area network, servers, or desktop. Indeed, the feature-rich desktop versions, loaded with applications, are largely credited with making Linux what it is today because they are virtually indistinguishable from their costly big-name commercial counterparts— and also boot faster. Continued on page 18 COMMUNICATIONS Commercial MSN Messenger Exchange Server AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) Trillian Pro Open Source Pidgin aMSN Adium Miranda IM Technology & Learning November 2007 | 17 http://osalt.com
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